After the mandatory mission pack (which has been hinted at), we'll just have to see what Carmack can come up with next. Obviously brining the Doom3 graphics quality to large open areas (a la Team Arena) would be certainly one possability. And if they want to make that MMO game (Quest), they'll have to do something about their player limit of four I think it would be asking a little too much of them to expect them to make something groundbreaking, they're not exactly a bunch of Shigeru's, are they?

Talking about lameness, I keep reading that the AI will suck, or, to quote Hollenshead;

To some extent the AI has to be tailored to what they're going to do. Whether it's guys that walk or guys that fly or guys that have a melee attack or what have you. All of that has to be [somewhat] scripted.

I thought they had this Mr. Elusive guy dedicated to making the AI? This sounds like Quake 2 -level enemy intelligence.

One thing the Valve guys claim to have, is that they have a much more backboned structure, with dynamic facial animations, and a powerful shading language. These are things I haven't heard Id about at all.

It's not, The Matrix meets The Ring doesn't sound even remotely like NOLF, it doesn't even resemble CJ. The NOLF franchise has never been about fear or realism, much less bullettime effects or martial arts-type action.

The sad part is not that Gore was a crappy game. I see those all the time.What makes this really sad, is that the alpha demo was a million times better than that crappy piece of unreal disco ripoff I had no_fun playing for fifteen minutes game was.The alpha had a more raw feel (less shiny surfaces and colored lights) and these great polygonal flamethrower effects. Plus a couple of kick-ass levels. Which of course got mutilated and fucked over for the final version.Not to mention the way they hired someone to screw up the player models.

However, the bar is set much higher this time. Few people had ever heard of Valve before Half Life actually got released.Now there's been so much hype, much of it bad, the game will have to impress and then some to have the same kind of impact and be regarded with the same kind of respect as the original.

Plus they told us nothing would be prescripted and everything turned out to be.

Well, I have to say it's pretty fun. Though it's a bit sad that by the time I had everything running smoothly with enough resources everywhere, I had won the mission.Don't know about the later missions, the combat in this first mission was boring. But that was to be expected.